Such are the dreams of the everyday academic

Months before classes start I'm already having first-day-of class nightmares. Last week's horror-fest featured the usual elements--no roster, no syllabus, nonfunctional technology--plus a new twist: poison ivy growing in the corners of the classroom, which one student gathered into lovely bouquets to share with others. 

Last night's nightmare was inspired by the newly revised edition of the Norton Anthology of American Literature that arrived on my desk last week: I was desperately trying to assemble a last-minute syllabus but couldn't find anything I needed  because instead of the usual densely printed pages of poetry and prose, the new anthology was full of colorful ads for luxury handbags and watches. It looked like 900 pages of advertisements torn from the Style issue of the New Yorker. How am I supposed to teach from that?

Well the good news is that I don't have to. The new anthology is fatter than the old one, which is not surprising since the time period covered keeps expanding. Post-Civil War American Literature now covers 22 more years than it did when I started teaching the subject, and a lot can happen in 22 years: Amit Majmudar! Colson Whitehead! George Saunders! I haven't opened the new anthology but I see from the publicity material that it includes a cluster of science fiction selections including works by Octavia Butler and N.K. Jemisin, which my students might find interesting. Will it include works inspired by the Covid pandemic, or is it still too soon for those works to have entered the canon? Will it include more drama or just the usual offerings? I get tired of Long Day's Journey into Night and A Streetcar Named Desire, but in the absence of meaningful alternatives, that's what I teach. And what will be left out?

The anthology sits on the desk in my office still unopened. I'm scheduled to teach the class in spring of 2023, but given the declining enrollments in literature surveys, I may not have enough students to even offer it, so what would be the point of opening the book at this early stage? And yet that's what I'm doing, if only in my dreams.